1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of operations management systems, and particularly to the field of advanced real-time monitoring and control systems using a dynamic temporal dimension.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
Business reporting or enterprise reporting is a fundamental part of identifying the capabilities and performance metrics within an organization to convert into knowledge to improve efficiency and overall performance of people, systems and processes within the organization. To support better business decision-making, businesses rely on large amounts of information (for example, transactional log files, system configuration information, human resource information, customer transaction data, path analytics, etc.) produced by management systems that provides managers with information about sales, inventories, and other data that would help in managing and improving the enterprise.
With the dramatic expansion of information technology, and a desire for increased competitiveness in corporations, there has been an enormous increase in the capture of large datasets representing every facet of business processing, customer transactions, and other data to understand and improve how the business functions (often referred to as ‘Big Data”). As such, computing power to produce unified reports (for example, those that join different views of the enterprise in one place) has increased exponentially. This reporting process involves querying data sources with different logical models to produce a human readable report. For example, in a customer service communication center environment, a manager may query a human resources database, an employee performance database, a set of transactional logs, and real-time metrics to identify where resources may require improvement and further training.
The problem with systems known in the art is that the cause of inefficiencies that appear in many complex interaction management systems, issues are never fully understood or the true cause understood or remedied due to the nature of how large datasets are presented which is typically as linear text files that are often many gigabytes in size. Using such a mechanism becomes prohibitive for human analysis and understanding. Furthermore, the ability to move to focus to a point in time of when the issue happened is not coherent when using a text file interface.
To remedy this situation, various techniques have been tried in the art, for example, a tabular presentation of data, or a collection of common objects and color coding text elements; however, this only provides a very limited improvement in data analysis of large complex data sets.
What is needed is a highly responsive system and methods to provide a graphical representation that enable users to better understand the data and use it to achieve tactical and strategic objectives. Furthermore a system that provides the ability to generate simulation data based on a knowledge of the behavior of the environment and give the ability for users to perform experimentation by changing system parameters in a controlled environment would increase the efficiency of businesses with large complex data sets.